30 June 2012

"Everyone talks about their love of nature. Any dacha-dweller in white trousers will maintain that there is nothing in the world to compete with nature. I remember seeing someone like that sitting on the sea-shore reading a book. It was sunset, one of the most beautiful sunsets that you could get on the shores of the Gulf of Finland - and he was reading, In the sky the clouds were engaged in a monumental battle, crashing into one another, changing their shapes and colors every minute, dying and coming back to life again, lit by a sunray which would unexpectedly break through them - and he carried on reading."

There is nothing idyllic in the writings of the Russian Leonid Andreyev (1871-1919). Censorship and the absence of civil liberties that we take for granted was pervasive under the Czars. By default the arts provided the only conduit for moral and intellectual impulses. political activity being foreclosed by a repressive regime. What is especially characteristic of Andreyev's works is the oscillation between exuberance and depression, the corrosive wit and sense of the superiority of his vision, and not just applied to himself. "He wished to be enormous - not for his own sake: he wished to reflect in his transitory tread as a writer - the march of the Century.." - Andrei Bielyi. To that end, Andreyev wrote not only the stories and plays he is remembered for, but painted and sketched and photographed.

Andreyev's temperament led him to predict the disasters of world war, revolution, and even something akin to nuclear weapons. Born in the country, Andreyev moved to Moscow to study law, becoming instead a court reporter for a Moscow newspaper. His first collection of stories was published to great effect in 1901, attracting the attention of Maxim Gorki. He careened through women and vodka until his marriage to Alexksandra provided him with as much stability as he could tolerate

Two sons were born, Vadim and Daniil, before Aleksandra died of
puerperal fever in 1906. Andreyev married Anna Denisevich in 1908, and
made the quixotic decision to separate his two little boys, keeping
Vadim with him and sending Daniil to live with Aleksandra's sister.
Vadim has written about the boys' alienation from their father, visible
in photographs.

The picture of Daniil with his father and step-father, taken on a rare visit to his father's home in Vammasluu, is far removed from the idyllic images of Heinrich Kuhn (see below).

Andreyev, whose connections with the revolutionaries of 1905, led to his exile after he published The Seven Who Were Hanged in 1909, built a large wooden house on the Gulf of Finland at Vammasluu. The house was impractical from the start, in need of constant repair, and after Andreyev's death Anna sold it for demolition. But it was only forty miles from St. Petersburg.

The Seven That Were Hanged (1909) was Andreyev's protest against
the executions the Russian government used to destroy the 1905
revolution. Through harrowing interior monologues we follow five
revolutionaries and two ordinary criminals as they come to terms with
their fates. He turned away from the expansiveness of Tolstoy and
Dostoevsky in depictions of confusion, distortion and hallucination are
something we recognize as distinctly modern.

In exile from Russia, Andreyev turned his prodigious energies to photography. Never inclined to hold back intensity on any project, he brought his fierce energy to bear documenting his new life and surroundings.

"It was as if he himself were a whole factory, working ceaselessly in
shifts, preparing all those masses of large and small photographs which
were stacked up in his study, contained in special boxes and chests,
overflwoing on every table, mounted on the window panes. There was no
cnroner in his house which he had not photographed several tiems over.
Some photographs were extremely successful, for instance spring
landscapes. It was jard to believe that they were photographs at all,
they were suffused with success elegiac musicality, reminding one of
Levitan." - Kornei Chukovsky, scholar
and children's author, was a frequent visitor to Vammasluu. He refers here to the painter Isaac Levitan.

Leonid and Anna made the first of many trips to the Mediterranean in 1910, attracted by the sun and warmth of the south.
Andreyev died in 1919 as he was preparing for a speaking tour of the
United States, to warn about the dangers of the Bolshevism. At age
forty-eight. he was dead of a brain hemorrhage.
Andreyev's American connection came in 1924 when MGM's first feature film was He Who Gets Slapped based one of his plays. The film starred Lon Chaney and Norma Shearer and was produced by Lous B. Mayer himself.

For further reading:Stories And Photographs by Leonid Andreyev, translated from the Russian by Olga Andreyev Carlisle, San Diego, Harcourt Brace & Jovanoich: 1987.Photographs of a Russian Writer by Richard Davies, London, Thames & Hudson: 1989.

26 June 2012

The French call the hour between sunset and darkness l'heure bleue (the blue hour). An evanescent state when the sky is illuminated by reflected light from the upper atmosphere. Jules Garvais-Courtellemeont underlined the poetic intent of this photograph when he named it L'heure violette. We can almost imagine the air over Damascus scented with almonds, jasmine and Bulgarian rose, the components of L'Heure Bleue, the perfume introduced by the House of Guerlain in 1912, around the time when Gervais-Courtellemont was in Syria.

The tranquility seems a far cry from current travails. But, as with all photographs, it tells the story of one moment. We cannot see the fighting between supporters and opponents of the Ottoman Revolution or the intellectuals who were hanged in the streets. Damascus, mentioned in both Old and New testaments of the Christian Bible, is of such ancient origin that its age is best measured by carbon-dating, not written history. The city and its inhabitants have experienced much.

I chose these images from among the 1,500 glass plates made by the French photographer Jules Gervais-Courtellemont who worked for the weekly magazine L'Illustration from 1893 to 1924. He was an immediate convert to color when the autochrome was introduced in 1907. Gervais-Courtellemont made his first trip to Istanbul and the Middle East for the magazine in 1893. An early war photographer, he publsihed two books of color photographs on the battles of the Marne and Verdun. He worked for National Geographic from 1924 until his death in 1931.

Jules Gervais-Courtellemont (1866-1931) was born near Paris but grew up in Algeria. He attributed his fascination with Islamic and Byzantine cultures to his peripatetic childhood. His friendship with the globe-trotting Orientalist Pierre Loti inspired an interest art photography, but Gervais-Courtellemont attempted tomove beyond the exoticism of the imaginary east to portray ordinary realityin his extremely successful Visions of the East. He had a "A head full of dreams and two feet on the ground" according to a friend.

His ability to fix fleeting atmospherics with grains of starch looks like alchemy but was grounded in the rigors of classical composition. I can imagine his delight at discovering the blue cloths drying on the rooftops, like remnants of the blue sky of midday left at twilight. The same spirit that led Gervais-Courtellemont to scale hills and ladders of new places impelled him through the blasted fields and towns of war.

Images:Autochrome photographs by Jules Gervais-Courtellemont are in the collection of Musee de la Ville de Paris.Dates are likely circa 1907-1920. 1. Crepuscule in Damascus (L'Heure violette).2. Terrace in Damascus.3. Mausoleum of the Whirling Dervishes. Konya (Turkey).

23 June 2012

If Viriginia Woolf was right when she said that on or about 1910 human nature changed, then photography changed in 1907 when the Lumiere Brothers of France introduced color with the autochrome. There had been other attempts at color photography before but the autochrome bested them on all measures: it was faster, easier, and cheaper to use, plus the results could be beautiful. One thing the new medium lacked was the clarity of black and white.

What color does in the pictures of Heinrich Kuhn is akin to what the Impressionists did in painting: injecting light and energy into a work to create moments of a seemingly eternal
present. Kuhn's black and white photographs resemble the woodblock
prints of his friend Hugo Henneberg and they are easier to date. Even though much clearer color processes have superseded the autochrome, in Kuhn's vision it looks contemporary.

Heinrich Kuhn (1866-1944) was born in Dresden and, although he studied to be a physician, he was really interested in micro-photography. As his efforts focused on art photography, Kuhn became a micro-manager, making sketches on top of graphs, placing his human subjects like a set designer, and manipulating the photographic plates - all to achieve a result that was a recognizable personal experience. "We did not see the way that quick shots would often lead one to believe," according to Kuhn. Questions like "Is photography Art?" are still debated but, in Kuhn's day, camera clubs were a way for photographers to combat public indifference to their work. (Kuhn founded Trifolium in 1898 with his friends Hugo Henneberg and Hans Watsek in 1897.)

The correspondences between many of Kuhn's images and paintings could be a mini-travelogue of turn of the century art. The influence of Cezanne's apples is strong, in Kuhn's work and in the viewer's eye, even in a black and white photograph from 1908. It takes a moment to realize that the three apples are, in fact, three oranges.

Most intriguing of all is Landscape. Picnic with its obvious resemblance to Le Ballon, Felix Vallotton's Nabi painting. In both images the artist's vantage point appears to be from a perch overhead in a balloon. Also, the humans appear to be chased by the shadows just as they plat at chases of their own, straw boaters punctuating the bright green of a summer day. Kuhn had attempted something similar in black and white, and he must have been dissatisfied with the result. Curiously, both images are now in the collection of the Musee d'Orsay in Paris. Aesthetically speaking, it could be argued that neither artists ever reached such heights again. Kuhn's later work was repetitive and he came to seem a cranky recluse by those who knew. Vallotton's oeuvre, neglected, has recently been reconsidered.

Kuhn's work is not well known in the U.S., so it is natural enough for the Neue Galerie to emphasize Kuhn's links to Alfred Steiglitz and Edward Steichen in their current exhibit. Understandable, but hardly necessary. Any more than we need to know the particulars of Kuhn's family, which he so carfeully and beautifully photographed.

An exhibition Heinrich Kuhn and His American Circle is on view at the Neue Galerie in Manhattan from April 26 to August 27, 2012.You may also be interested in Heinrich Kuhn & Leon Dabo, posted here Janaury 25, 2011.

16 June 2012

“The green Parc Monceau, with
its soft lawns veiled in misty curtains of spray from the sprinkler, attracted
me, like something good to eat. There
were fewer children there than in the Luxembourg. It was better altogether. But those lawns that are swept like
floors! Never mind, the trees
enchanted me and the warm dampness I breathed in relaxed me….that sound of
leaves, how sweet it was!” - Sidonie-Grabreille Colette, excerpt from Claudine In Paris, 1901.
The naughty Claudine - and her creator - were preceded at the site by Joan of Arc who encamped at Monceau during the summer of 1429 in her audacious attack on Paris, thus assuring its continuing fame even if it had remained an empty field. But in 1769 Louis Philippe II, Duc de Chartres (1747-1793) purchased the plot on the Right Bank after marrying the richest woman in France. Four years later he commissioned the engineer/architect Louis Carrogis (Carmontelle) to create a garden for his new home.

Exactly what prompted Carrogis to design one of the early great landscape gardens in France, the ability to draw on the duke's royal purse encouraged him to design a theatrical extravaganza that would, in Carrogis's words. "unite in one garden all places and all times." The duke, a cousin of Louis XVI, and no stranger to Versailles had high standards in these matters.
Carrogis would draw on all of world history to create the Jardin de Monceau. Among many points of interest, the garden included an Egyptian pyramid, a Turkish minaret, and a Roman naumacchia, an artificial lake for the staging of mock naval battles, whose decaying columns still stand. A model farm that included a water wheel and a windmill demonstrated the duke's interest in scientific experiments. This mixture of frivolity and earnest effort has a hallmark of the French Enlightenment. If play is the essential human activity, as the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga claimed, then history itself played at the Parc Monceau.

"...it was not my object to define the place of play among all other
manifestations of culture, but rather to ascertain how far culture
itself bears the character of play." - Johan Huizinga, from the forward to Homo Ludens, 1938.

Louis Philippe, by then Duke of Orleans, was executed during the French Revolution and his garden was confiscated by the state. It went untended until Napoleon III hired Baron Haussmann to make modern city out of Paris. Another engineer, Adolphe
Alphand (1817-1891) was put in charge of promenades and he laid out
a refurbished Parc Monceau that opened in 1861 . Some of the old follies were kept, and new features
added, including a stream crossed by a bridge, a cascade and a grotto. Moving
water was used to evoke cleanliness and modernity, two qualities that had been sorely lacking in the dark, dirty streets of old Paris. The public was enchanted, including the many artist who flocked there to paint: Raffaele Ragione, Claude
Monet, Gustave Caillebotte, Henri Lebasque and the American Childe Hassam.

Today people walk their dogs and children play among the decaying pre-Revolutionary relics just as they did in Colette's day. Only their clothes have changed. The modern world may impinge on the edges of the park more than it used to but this fantastic little world is a monument to the primacy of play in human life. The children playing with hoops and pails and shovels in Jean-Emile Laboureur's decorative screen could be the forerunners of wheels and steam shovels.

12 June 2012

"There will be no edges, but curves.
Clean lines pointing only forward.

History, with its hard spine & dog-eared
Corners, will be replaced with nuance.

Just like the dinosaurs gave way
To mounds and mounds of ice.

Women will still be women, but
The distcintion will be empty, Sex,

Having outlived every threat, will gratify
Only the mind, which is where it will exist.

For kicks, we'll dance for ourselves
Before mirros studded with golden bulbs.

The oldest among us will recognize that glow -
But the word sun will have been re-assigned

To a Standard uranium-Neutralizing device
Found in households and nursing hoes.

And yes, we'll live to be much older, thanks
To popular consensus. Wreightless, unhinged,

From even our own moon, we'll drift
In the haze of space, which will be, once

And for all, scrutable and safe."
- Sci-Fi is published in Life Of Mars by Tracy K. Smith, Minneapolis, Graywolf Press: 2011.

Tracy K. Smith was recently awarded the 2011 Pultizer Prize in poetry for Life On Mars. The book includes the long poem The Speed of Belief, an elegy for her father, a scientist who . worked on the development of the Hubble space telescope. In Smith's poems, religion, science, and art are the abstractions that help us to escape earth's gravity, to catapult us into the larger universe we can barely imagine. She also pays homage to David Bowie's surreal and abstract song of the same name in more than one poem.

I've mentioned before how the support of a dedicated patron can have a limiting effect on an artist's reputation when it results in a small number of museums displaying the artist's work. Examples are Charles Lang Freer and the artists Thomas Wilmer Dewing and Dwight William Tryon or Duncan Phillips and the artist Augustus Vincent Tack. Recently, in A Curator's Quest William S. Rubin of the Museum of Modern Art tells how he persuaded Duncan Phillips to part with Dune by Tack, by saying that Tack deserved to be on view in New York City. (The Phillips Collection is in Washington, D.C.) What Rubin doesn't say is whether it was by chance or by some visual affinity that two of the paintings he acquired for the museum present the cosmos in the same unusual palette: mauve, yellow, and green. The Hubble, launched in 1990, has transmitted back to earth images of Magellanic Clouds in deepest mauve.

08 June 2012

Looking at Vittorio Zecchin'a work the obvious reference point is Gustav Klimt. We've been prepared to see an affinity between the two artists by legions of art historians who present a linear narrative that tells us Zecchin was a lesser artist influenced by the famous Viennese Secessionist. But is that all there is to the story?

Looking closer at Zecchin, we see a Venetian artist using the art history of Venice as his textbook. The arrangement of human figures in procession he saw in the churches of Venice and the elaboration of abstract designs was familiar from the Byzantine architecture of the Doge's Palace. He combined design elements typical of Murano glass: corollas, stars, and flowers with geometrical forms.

What makes Zecchin different from Klimt is what makes Venice different from Vienna. Klimt's patterns also draw on historical sources but what scandalized his contemporaries was thesex in the mosaics as much as in the naked human figures. Ovoid shapes intermingled with spermatozoa circulating on a sea of avid eyescould hardly go unnoticed by a public that greeted each new monograph from Sigmund Freud with shocked fascination.Everything seemed to be reducible to the sexual impulse in Freud's interpretations and in Klimt's art sexuality had even penetrated the shell of abstraction.

Vittorio Zecchin (1878-1947) was sixteen years younger than Klimt and his career got a late start due to to the conservative teachers he encountered at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia. The son of a glass maker on the island of Murano, Zecchin grew up surrounded by the stylized use of color as decoration and design. The gold-leaf mosaics in the Basilica of San Marco earned it the nickname Chiesa d'Oro (Church of Gold) soon after it was consecrated in 1094. Klimt, who didn't travel much, visited Venice specifically to see the mosaics.

As we just saw in Giacomo Balla's The Madwoman the Divisionist style of painting, popular during Zecchin's youth, employed discrete dabs of color, a move that created a painted surface similar to a mosaic or a glass bijoux. He attended the Venice Biennials each year, including the large Klimt show in 1910, but exhibited his own work with the rejected artists in a tent city on the beach in 1914.

The reviewers for the daily papers were not always kind to Zecchin, but that changed in 1913 when he was commissioned to execute a series of panels based on The Thousand and One Nights for the Hotel Terminus. The finished work is a masterpiece of Italian art nouuveau (Stile Liberty) and, although the panels have since been dispersed to various collections, the Ca' Peraso where Zecchin himself exhibited is presenting a reunion of the eleven panels during an exhibition in 2012 dedicated to the art of Zecchin - under the guise of the "Klimtiano" 150th anniversary year.

05 June 2012

"Hours wasted in vain
in the asylum gardens,
Back and forth along the walls
made fierce with flowers,
All of us lost in a fleeting
dream of reality,
Which some cleric
tossed behind our backs.
And after meeting
some patients smile
at the fake friendliness.
Time wasted in whirling thoughts,
hedged in behind the bars,
liked naked swallows.
Then we listened to the sermons,
we multiplied the fishes,
Down near the Jordan,
but Christ was not there:
He had uprooted us from the world,
Like dreadful weeds."- Near the Jordan by Alda Merini, tranlsated from the Italian by Stephanie H. Jed & Pasquale Verdicchio.

If you don't read Italian your chances of stumbling on the poems of Alda Merini are slight. Merini (1931-2009) lived most of her life in her native Milan. She showed a talent for poetry at an early age and, in spite of enormous internal turmoil, she eventually published more than one hundred volumes. In photographs we see her wavy brown hair and the cigarette in her hand . She had the additional misfortune - if you want to call it that - to be nominated for the Nobel Literature Prize in 1996, the same year as the Polish poet, Wislawa Szymborska, who won the prize.

Merini's thoughts never skated over the surface of life like a water beetle. Near the Jordan is an exemplary poem of Merini's, holding opposing ideas in balance - or at bay - in an unsteady state. Between the altered states of incarceration and freedom she lived with a double consciousness, experienced at times as a gift, at other times as a burden. If this seems dark, Merini's poetry also conveys a light ouch. I like to think of Merini's aphorisms when I think of the ponderousness of church fathers.

"I am completely
Asexual
Not counting
Errors and omissions." - from Six Aphorisms, 1999, Alda Merini, translated from the Italian by Douglas Basford.

I Am A Furious Little Bee by Alda Merini, translated from the Italian by Carla Billitteri, Oaklamd, Hooke Press: 2008.

Love Lessons by Alda Merini, translated from the Italian by Susan Stewart, Princeton, Princeton University Press: 2009. You may also be interested in:The War of Nerves: Peter Altenberg & Emily Holmes Coleman, posted here November 3, 2011

All the Planets in Heaven, All the Stars: Gaspara Stampa, posted here August 28, 2010.

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Why The Blue Lantern ?

A blue-shaded lamp served as the starboard light for writer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette's imaginary journeys after she became too frail to leave her bedroom at the Palais Royale. Her invitation, extended to all, was "Regarde!" Look, see, wonder, accept, live.

"I think of myself as being in a line of work that goes back about twenty-five thousand years. My job has been finding the cave and holding the torch. Somebody has to be around to hold the flaming branch, and make sure there are enough pigments." - Calvin Tompkins